On first time power up I got some white flashes and smoke. There is now a charcoal colored line along a trace at the center of the board. On inspection I found I forgot to jumper the shield to ground. Is this worth pursuing or should I order a new board and start over?

yeah the 2011 PCB and 2008 assembly manual board picture do not jive...I think as long as you ground the "chassis gnd" you'll be ok...

as for the OP's problem, the manual implies if you didn't ground properly you'd get oscillations/hum/noise, not a nuclear meltdown...I'm wondering if perhaps he missed one of the other jumpers the board needs?? I doubt Decware is shipping the old versions of the board anymore...

Huh...looking at the board, the trace on one side of J2 is on the opposite side of the board from a ground trace, so it shorted *thru* the board? eesh...did you find any wiring mistakes that may have led to that? That would suck if it showed up with that flaw...

anyhow, hopefully a jumper will do the trick...it does sound like you'll need to scrape off the J2 trace at some point to open that short to ground...

Capacitor polarities are correct. Looks like there might have been a solder bridge to a resistor pad on the bottom of the board, even though I did check continuities after each solder. I will be opening the J2 trace with a Dremel to de-energize it. I'll let you know how things progress, but at some point I'll be tempted to go to point-to-point wiring instead of the PCB. Its difficult to see whats happening in real time with traces on both sides of the board.

If it is the mod, then it is on the PCB I have (Rev 9, 2011). Has anyone else built on this board? I was measuring the output of the Edcor (XPWR107-120) disconnected from the PCB. I get 650V between the two reds (vs. 600V specified) and 330V between red and center tap (vs. 300V expected). Is this within tolerance? Between the filament browns I get 6.5V (vs. 6.3V specified).

I have the same PCB, and the same Edcor's. Mine actually measured 345-0-345 disconnected. Connected, they measured 330-0-330. I got 6.9 on the brown wires, but it dropped to 6.5 when connected. Edcor says they add a 5% load factor.

I'm still working on mine...MattG had similar voltages on his. It's the other voltage checkpoints that are important.

Update -- I wired over the J2 trace directly to the 1K 2W plate resistor and opened the trace with a Dremel. Now the PCB arced and smoked at the point where my bypass wire attached to the plate resistor. The challenge continues. Now I'm disassembling and individually testing all of the components, which so far have checked out OK.

I just completed point-to-point assembly using the schematic on this site and the amp fired right up. Running through Polk Audio book shelf speakers there is plenty of volume. There is a very slight hum which is only noticeable between tracks but I haven't put in the center tap fake for the Edcor heaters yet. Sound quality is very good and I look forward to A/B testing against my Dynakit ST-70 push-pull. I'll post pics when I get the final clean up completed.